Reasons to be cheerful

The latest polls out yesterday put the Conservatives on 46%, a good ten points ahead of Labour on 36%. Not bad for a government in power, not bad for a government that has blundered through the Wuhan virus and not bad for a government facing an opposition that should be enjoying a bounce. As I predicted, Captain Hindsight is not a leader to win the election in 2024 but to reform the Labour party to give it a good crack at 2029.

That the Conservatives are really annoying not only the comrades but elements of the authoritarian alt-right means the party is getting it right. That the PM is a one-nation libertarian much like myself gives me a good feeling, and gives little traction to an attempted counter-reformation move last week by Hammond, Gaulk and their media supporters. These supranationalist dags of the global corporates could only accuse the PM of being 'authoritarian' - a frankly laughable accusation. Sweeties, a strong and confident libertarian remains a libertarian.

We have a cabinet adjustment due in the autumn and we know already that David Frost is due to take over as National Security Advisor in September. The triumvirate at the heart of change, the PM, Dominic and Michael Gove, will be strengthened. Reform is high on the agenda - the NHS, PHE, the Electoral Commission and the BBC are already scored, and the Integrated Defence Review should be ready to report. So Health and Defence are key cabinet seats to watch.

As Nick Drew has for some time pointed out over at C@W, green energy is now going mainstream. Business is taking it on in a big way. And here again our reclamation of our 200 mile EEZ should stand us in good stead. The shallow North Sea, and in particular the Dogger Bank, most of which is British, make offshore wind an easy win for the UK, to an extent that could surpass our daily grid demand. At night, when we're not using power, it can be used to make Hydrogen, the combustion fuel of the future. And all those empty North Sea wells also in the UK zone give us a fantastic storage potential for CO2.

Green has broken free of the XR cranks and has gone mainstream. And the public, the voters, have also accepted this is the way to go.

In the Culture War, the PM's open refusal to kneel to imagined guilt gets the support of 67% of the British public, and of all libertarians, and leads a pushback against the tyranny of the metropolitan mob. Little Owen Jones, a spiteful and vicious leader of the Cancel culture, may have realised in a Marat-moment that the hate could turn back on him. In 1793 Jones would have been the shrieky hysterical little sans-culotte offering head after head to Madame Guillotine.

For the financial backers of the several attempted blows against the government, you've lost your money. These pushes for power either succeed at first instance or they fade and falter into background attritional noise. The attempted coup around the orchestrated attempts to get Dom came closest, but exposed the key players and marked them for later disposal - to be sidelined into irrelevance, excluded from the circles of power, briefed against and so on.

Of course we've still got the collapse of the global economy and a lethal pandemic virus to crack, but all in all things look good. Many reasons to be cheerful. 

Freedom and democracy

What stops the young, fit and strong from stealing wealth and assets from the elderly, weak and infirm? Of course the very wealthy can afford to employ other young, fit and strong persons who will protect them just as long as their weekly wedge gives them more than killing their employer and taking their stuff. If you want to see just how this works in practice in a society devoid of law or justice, watch a few episodes of Narcos on Netflix. The drugs markets and the lawless societies in which the kingpins flourish are the true example of free markets - power, wealth, ruthlessness and inhumanity are the qualities favoured in this environment of accelerated evolution. A wholly free market would mean not only food and toilet paper but ICU beds, ventilators, vaccines and medical resources would accrue to the wealthiest or those with the biggest guns. So be careful what you wish for.

Research has shown consistently that when faced with great risk and great uncertainty, and with unknown outcomes, we humans will opt for a social safety-net model every time. We will vote for a minimum-provision-for-everyone model when none of us can be sure we will not require it ourselves. But we will also vote for the opportunity to better one's lot - whether that means keeping hens or retaining our existing store-cupboards and hoard of silver. And this model needs a functioning state that can exercise a greater power than any individuals, that can enforce law and justice and protect the weak and vulnerable. It doesn't have to be a big State, or an intrusive state, but it does have to be able to execute the collective will. Expressed through the secret ballot by universal suffrage and the right of free association.

Anyone here who really wants a wholly free market, take yourself off to Mexico or Colombia. Anyone here who really wants a socialist paradise, take yourself off to Venezuela. No? No takers? OK, so I guess we're just discussing where the floor should be in our social-democratic model, then, and the degree of freedom individuals can exercise under various condition of risk, threat and uncertainty.

That we're having to discuss such things for the first time in this new century is actually a good thing. That we've got the internet on which to do so makes this discussion different from the discussions we had in 1850 or 1917 or 1945. Excellent!

Britain's booming 'austerity' economy

Two charts that bear close study form the base of today's post. The RSA's Fabian Wallace-Stephens (who with a name like that should probably be standing for Kier Starmer's Deputy in the Labour leadership hustings) has looked at the fastest growing and shrinking occupations from the Labour Force Survey - here are the charts (clicky) and my comments below.

The first thing to note is the degree of substitution - occupations having the same skill sets and that enable workers to migrate from one category to another. This includes for example workers who move from sales and retail assistants jobs to call-centre jobs. Secondly are the changes in the structure of the labour market away from permanent employment by a single employer to a melange of self-employment and short term and temporary gig work; the full-time waiter is being replaced by a new breed of actress/waitress/whatever who may supplement their instagram enabler role with a few evening sessions carrying plates at the local pizza parlour. Without the counterpart to these charts - the charts that map the rise and fall of business and commercial activities - some changes are misleading.

However, a few trends are noteworthy. Supporting the Prime Minister's undertakings and undermining the NHS Cassandras, we have seen about 70,000 more nurses between 2011 and 2019 and an equivalent additional number of nursing auxiliaries and assistants. We have seen almost 80,000 additional care workers and 65,000 nursery nurses and assistants. Just those four categories have gained some 285,000 additional workers, demonstrating the growth in demand. What we must do now is work out how to pay for it.

The internet impact on retail is clear, with significant losses in shop and retail jobs offset by the growth of some 100,000 delivery driver jobs, and I suggest many more amongst the huge 4159 admin class gain* (nec = not elsewhere classified) are part of the internet shopping logistics tail. I'd suggest the one anomaly in class 7111 - massive female losses in retail sales but a modest increase in males - may be due to the blokeyness of mobile phone shop staffing.

The clear gainer though is what we used to call IT. As one would expect as we transition into the next wave of an AI economy. And the most visible impact is on central and local government - both clear losers, and not as the unions would have you believe from 'austerity' but from, well, change.

And one overall change that is inescapable - and confirmed by an unemployment figure that has dropped substantially during this period - is that employment growth overall greatly exceeds shrinkage; obvious in the images even given the exaggerated job-shrinkage scale in the graphics. And that really is good news.

Evening Standard, 21/01/2020 - * another increase for SOC 4159

Boris is right - the dreary pessimists must pack their bags

I think today will be the last Monday - at least for some time - that Boris Johnson's column appears in the Telegraph. His final appeal is for an end to the gloomy prognostications of failure, the hangdog jowls, the droopy bitter eyes, the negative vibes. When he moves into Number Ten, we can be sure at least he will not be dragged down by a depressive, negative neighbour - Hammond has already been pictured packing, and will be gone before Boris arrives. His main point is that fifty year ago we put a man on the moon. Solving an issue of a customs border in Ireland is piffle. 

I've lost count of the times on construction schemes when I've been told it can't be done, it's impossible, the cost will be prohibitive. The reason I was picked to deliver so many 'difficult' schemes (and they are still trying to get me to do so - despite my strict instructions to my agent as to my very picky criteria for new work) I believe is that I had a reputation for being 'agile' at a time when the term wasn't even in the vocabulary of the management consultants. Usually all it took was a quiet and sympathetic chat with the boss of the engineering / design consultancy, telling them I understood if the task was too great for them, if they couldn't cope. There was no shame in it. We would arrange their quiet replacement by another practice. Fee-earning firms don't expect to be sacked - they expect their word to be gospel on the feasibility or not of some scheme aspect. Nine times out of ten it did the trick. You see, the task was very rarely impossible - more often the key consultants just didn't want to do it my way.

So I am with Boris on this. I've had a working lifetime of dreary dullards predicting failure and a lifetime's experience of proving them wrong. Boris writes

And I am afraid that there are technological pessimists – some of them apparently in London – who seem genuinely to think that such technical solutions are impossible, that they are a kind of logical contradiction, a mythological species that we will never see in this universe. Are they right? Of course not. There is abundant scope to find the solutions necessary – and they can and will be found, in the context of the Free Trade Agreement that we will negotiate with the EU (and this is common to both candidates in the current leadership contest) after we have left on October 31.

It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these technical issues. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border. There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.

For a final column, that's not bad. 

Moving the pieces for battle

The decisive battles of the Brexit war will be fought this year. If we're to win, we need everyone on board, and everyone pulling their weight. This weekend it's becoming clearer that the pieces are being moved on the board to allow a major Brexit offensive, including an autumn general election -

• Boris is forming a war cabinet to deliver Brexit in 100 days
• Sedwill is being moved and Robbins is expected to jump
• Other mandarins out-of-tune with a Brexit government will also disappear
• Arron banks / Leave EU are continuing to help cull Remainer Tory MPs
• Farage is selecting PPCs and outlining an initial manifesto

No-one is talking openly yet, but the closer we get to a GE the greater the realisation that the Conservatives need to leave TBP a clear field in the old Labour heartlands outsides London. Some 148 currently Labour constituencies voted Leave - and these must be the first target of TBP where they have a chance of winning. Overall there are some 410 Leave-voting seats to around 240 Remain  constituencies.

Against us we have a Remain establishment and media looking to exploit every vulnerability, every knuckle-dragging social media embarrassment. The Leave side are also now catching up on playing the social-media archaeology game - as the outing of the hapless Maitlis' sock-puppet debate 'guests' demonstrates.

The end is within sight. Do not discount the Brexit Party gaining 30 or 40 seats in the GE from Labour - and being in coalition government with my Party before Christmas.

DO NOT screw it up.

Postscript
========
The most glorious day here - too hot in the Sun, but a chance to clean and tidy the workshop whilst listening to the England innings (216 for 3 at writing) free from BBC geoblocking on the superb  https://www.guerillacricket.com/schedule. Now a few carrots for the horses, who will welcome the rain tomorrow ..

Reith lectures - ECHR

The third of five Reith lectures this year by Lord Sumption is a corker. For any of you willing to invest half an hour this weekend I commend most strongly listening to the podcast - a transcript is also available. Both are slightly marred by the lightweight inanities of Anita Anand (who she?)

Rarely do we get the chance to hear from either non-politicians or non-social media polemicists on matters of urgent threat to democracy. Here we have one of Britains most senior judges setting out with impeccable reasoning the threat posed by judges to what we have understood hitherto to be the preserve of democratic processes and decisions.

He also exposes the most fundamental difference between the supranational globalists ever seeking to expand the powers of unelected authority and those of us stalwart in our defence of democratic rights;

For those who believe that fundamental rights should exist independently of democratic choice, dynamic treaties have an obvious attraction. They create a source of law which is independent of democratic political choices. The European Convention on Human Rights is a classic dynamic treaty.

For a heavyweight case for the UK's withdrawal from the ECHR and the ECtHR - not Lord Sumption's first choice - here are all the arguments. Anand's irritating vacuous twittering is only a very minor impairment. Don't bother with the Q&A segment at the end. 

The first two lectures are also well worth hearing - challenging tangentially the moral certainties behind both Remain and Leave - and not always comfortable. There are two more to come - the next with a US (Washington, I think) audience on the subject of written vs. unwritten constitutions .

I haven't paid the TV Tax since 2015, but here at least is some of my money back.

SMASHED

Well, you can read the news as well as I can. Just 3 MEPs for the Conservatives, but including Dan Hannan. I must say 9% of the vote was better than I was expecting - if May hadn't announced her resignation, I'm convinced we would have got no more than 6% and no seats. More good news in PTSD Adonis having been disappointed, but that's thin cheer.

For most people of course TBP's success is the single story. Nothing can detract from 28 seats - possibly 29 when the last two areas declare. If the party had been around a month or two longer I suspect they would have taken even more votes from both Labour and the Conservatives.

And of course the LibDems, the Remain party, with some 2/3rds of the Brexit Party votes, will also now move to consolidate their status as the Brexit opposition party with an eye to the next GE, with the advantage of an established party structure and existing parliamentary incumbency. They can sell themselves as "We're not Corbyn" and also take more voters from Labour and Conservative parties. The CUKs are nothing - forget their grandiose delusions of a 'pact' with the LibDems. Cable can tell them to join-up or FO.

All over Europe the victor has been .... democracy. Turnout up, apple carts overturned, politicians in tears, some dreams shattered, others come to fruition. Nothing earth shattering, but a clear message. The Conservative Party, like Labour, may have no future, the corpses of both parties picked over by the Teal and Orange insurgents, but for now will remain in government . Our MPs will be shitting themselves and will avoid a GE like a vampire eschews garlic.

Have a good day all - Today is a good day. 

                                       Predicted %             Actual %
Brexit                                        34                       32
LibDem                                     17                       20
Lab                                            15                       14
Green                                        11                        12
Con                                             9                          9
CUK                                           4                          3
UKIP                                          3                          3

Three varieties of Remain fanatics

Of the Remainer minority in the Referendum, only a small number are the sort of Remainer fanatics so disturbed by losing that they are prepared to condone any trickery, any betrayal, any perversion of democracy and even violence to deny their defeat. And of that small number of fanatics, there are I think three varieties.

First are the (generally) youthful, naive and selfish. They are not driven by any ideological or economic concerns or any doubts over Britain's future as an independent nation but purely by what they see are their personal losses. They have a sense of entitlement to 'stuff' they imagine is free, such as Erasmus, or Euro railcards, that the EU have cleverly spent taxpayers' money to shower on them for just this reason. Their chance to lig around the EU like gypsies at someone else's expense may be curtailed, they fear. These are the milkchuckers, the silly street rabble draped in EU rags.

Secondly are the more altruistic who genuinely do have economic fears, or fears that we can simply not flourish as a nation without being part of the embrace of the Federast empire. For these I have the greatest sympathy. All I can answer to their fears is that many of them are contrived and invented by cynical users such as the former Chancellor or the current one who use such lies to manipulate public opinion. Their genuine concerns are being used to stir them to anti-democratic behaviour. I think poor Andrew Adonis is in this category; an effete, naive and foolish fop stomping his foot in well-intentioned frustration.

Finally are the ideologues, the zealots committed to the European Empire. These are the Grieves, Soubrys, Starmers and Thornberrys, the Boultons, O'Briens and Graylings. The civil service. The entire bien-pensant patrician establishment, the political class. Globalists all. Their nation means little to them in the scheme of things; they owe allegiance to supranational masters. Of all the remainers, these are the most deadly - and the sole class of remainer fanatic against whom we should exert our time and energy.

Robert Tombs writes today in the Telegraph about extremist Remainers but lumps all three types together as though they were a homogeneous rump. They are not. He's better I think at defining Leavers - but fails to demonstrate that Brexit is about so much more than Brexit.

Millions seem set on voting resoundingly for Brexit at the European elections. They are angry with politicians but not intimidated by the future. I realised that we might well vote to leave the EU when I saw a Eurobarometer poll (carried out by the EU itself) in 2013, showing that Britain was the only member country in which the majority believed they could better face the future outside the EU. This belief reflected a realisation that the EU was failing, and a confidence based on Britain’s history that it could succeed.

Watching the Brexit Party's London rally via iPhone clips on Twitter yesterday evening I felt, as a Conservative Party member, a little like a plump lamb at a kebab convention. But such thoughts are for the weekend. For today, congratulations to Nigel and TBP and all my fervent wishes for you to smash the polls tomorrow. 

Britain - Not a Bumblebee but a Hornet

Without a deal, without a Norway / Canada / EFTA / EEA framework, without subjecting the nation to the hand of trans-European bureaucracy, we are told, our nation is a Bumblebee. The world's top scientists have proven that it is quite impossible for a Bumblebee to fly; the body is too large, the wing area too small. Like the Bumblebee, we are told, the UK will be earthbound, crawling about like a beetle, unless we imprison ourselves in some version of benign State framework. 

But now right at the end of the year, other news is reaching us. The pharma industry has already sorted itself for a no-deal exit, as has the financial sector. Airlines check - now there's time to do the paperwork. Ports OK, with mothballed ports ready to re-open and existing ports upgrading capacity. Bit of a problem with cars, but hey, that's a German worry. 

Even on an individual basis, folk across Europe are sorting themselves out. Well, except for the more hysterical, who tend to be Remainers, and can't think of anything else to do but post increasingly deranged nonsense on Twitter. I've swapped my UK driving licence for an Austrian one; painless. Twelve minutes in a local office without a queue and with a real human on the counter. New one arrived two days later. So I can drive in both the UK and EU for free and without bother and without an additional document or cost. 

The other untruth we are being told is that unless the UK leaves with a formal divorce treaty, the regard in which our nation is held will plummet globally. Our rep will be dust. Britain's good name will be ruined. Total bollocks.

Just as long as we show that we've made adequate preparations to leave on 29th March and go straight to WTO terms, that the Cassandra Remainer media have little red meat to whine about, and that we make a decent fist of a complex and adverse situation, the success with which we leave may actually increase the regard in which we're held. I suspect the news now emerging is that the real Britain is now far better prepared than is the government. And not only prepared to fly like a Bumblebee, but to seek novel and rewarding opportunities across the oceans, to transform the world's fifth largest economy from a satrap State enchained to a sluggard dullard of a failed Federation into an international Hornet. 

No. The only cohort who fear leaving without a deal are the establishment; the political and mandarin elites. Their failure to secure a deal will show the world that neither are any longer fit for purpose. It will be a failure of the Central State, the failure of a grasping power-hoarding Whitehall, the failure of Big Government that sets the statutory calorie value of every fast-food hamburger and legislates to control the size of BBQ sauce portions. It will, with a shove, precipitate the sort of Localism that we desperately need, and force the root and branch reform of our failed senior civil service.

....and they're off!

With polling stations about to open, reading the press you might wonder why bother to vote. It's a foregone conclusion, they say - a wipeout for Halal-Labour-Momentum, with the Tories kicked out of local government and Corbyn triumphant. Well, if you believe that old bollocks there's no hope. 

For a start, the pollsters can't call election results at the moment. Well, not to within +/- 10%, anyway. One issue is that people interviewed on mobile devices are less honest than those the pollsters used to call on what are now quaintly called 'home telephones'. The other is that IVR has removed 2m people from the voting rolls who should not have been there and added a missing 2m who should have been. 

I think the Halal-Labour swings will be less significant than thought but that Mrs May will still get a handbagging. Let's wait and see. The real test for me will be the turnout in the five test areas for voter ID. To those who aver that is no proven history of personation to justify such measures nationally, I say well, I'll bet you said that about child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and all those other towns a few years ago. Not catching offenders doesn't prove that crimes aren't being committed. 

For those of you who have been out on the stump for UKIP or Conservatives or whomever, well done; you are the backbone of democracy. Win or lose, you've already won.  

Addition
=======
These are the comment settings, all that Blogger has available. If anyone knows how to make verification even less onerous, let me know. Blogger also sometimes decides that comments from regulars are 'spam' and since I only look at this once a week or so to free the poor trapped things I apologise for tardyness. I tried Disqus for a while but you all hated it. 

 

Geert Wilders is a prybar, not a national leader

Geert Wilders scored his greatest success back in January, when the electoral threat of the PVV forced incumbent PM Mark Rutte sharply to the right. With full-page adverts on 23rd January in all the national papers and an interview for tabloid Algemeen Dagblad, Mr Rutte had a blunt message for the Netherlands migrants and Moslems - Get Out if you don't like it. Rutte wrote "We feel a growing unease when people misuse our freedoms to spoil everything, when they have come to our country for freedom. People who don’t want to adapt, who attack gay people, who shout at women in short skirts or call ordinary Dutch people racist." Those who wouldn't adapt to Dutch social liberalism should leave. "Be normal, or Begone".

Rutte declared back then that yesterdays election was not about the EU, tax, economics or public services but national identity. "There is one question to be answered. What sort of country do we want?". Last night he had his answer. And I think that we should welcome the result, which I interpret as strong support for a Dutch identity that means freedom, liberalism, tolerance and above all, social congruence. 

Rutte's view that the Dutch have rejected the 'wrong sort' of populism is, I think, correct. His own declarations from January were the 'right' kind of populism. Voters like his strong message, but also trust him to be fair. And Wilders was given just enough encouragement to ensure he continues to act as an effective prybar, keeping the new centreground levered to the right, and most importantly keeping the question of Dutch national identity to the fore. 

The Netherlands is a smart little country. 

Brexit: The Sekt is on ice .......

With our Article 50 notification now just a hair's breadth away, we can expect today some spectacular last-minute disruptions. Satan's little sex-toy to the North will probably announce a new independence referendum, just as US fracking is making third-stage extraction from the North Sea increasingly uneconomic. Soros and his little helpers will throw money at QCs in an effort to use the law to scupper Parliament. The BBC will no doubt find reasons to announce today some dire economic forecasts amid tones of general gloom. Little Owen Jones may offer free blowies to Brexiteers who recant, Lily Allen will give away copies of her dire new album, currently bombing, and even Lord Geldof may emerge to sneer at, shower with spittle and swear at the common folk before his carers get him back into his bath chair. 

None of which should make the slightest difference to the Brexit Bill. If it clears its stages today unamended, I can think of no greater gift to our Sovereign Lady than to submit the Bill for Royal Assent allowing the Prime Minister to give Brussels our formal notice tomorrow. 

There will be a general screeching from Farringdon as a distraught Polly Toynbee dribbles salty snot over a wailing Suzanne Moore's velvet kitten heels. Some hopeless little bloke called Farron will call all the TV stations ( "there's some bloke called Dim Pharom on the line ... yeah, third time he's called ... OK, we'll bar the number" ) Gina Miller will vow revenge on the British people and devote her remaining fortune to keeping members of the bar in Claret, and in Brussels the pressed duck (four fat Flemish ducks for each Commissioner, reduced to a cube the size of a fag packet by a powerful hydraulic press,  a favourite dish served by Herr Juncker) will regorge and repeat acidly into the night. 

Here, I'll pop the caps on a brace of Sekt bottles cooling in the fridge. If it happens.